Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 241| Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 241 NOTES Introduction (pages 1–19) 1. This was British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel’s warning to Chaim Weizmann from 1921. I thank Liora Russman Halperin for this citation. See her superb bachelor’s thesis, “The Arabic Question: Zionism and the Politics of Language in Palestine, 1918– 1948” (Harvard University, 2005), 74. 2. This desire is deeply embedded in the founding document of the State of Israel, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State from 14 December 1948, which declares: “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. . . . Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland.” 3. The Arabic term Nakba was coined in 1948 by the historian Constantine Zureik. The literature on the Nakba and the Palestinian right of return is large and growing. In terms of literary representation, Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun is peerless in evoking the sense of longing, neglect, and misfortune that the Nakba caused Palestinian refugees. It bred, on one hand, a kind of psychic malady among displaced Palestinians that Khoury’s narrator calls “Return fever.” It also generated a well-developed sense of self-deprecation, no more poignantly expressed in the novel than by a Palestinian woman to an Israeli officer: “We’re the Jews’ Jews.” See Khoury, Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams), trans. Humphrey Davies (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Archipelago, 2006), 62, 381. 4. Khalil Shikaki, “The Right of Return,” Wall Street Journal, 30 July 2003. This point was affirmed by a recent New York Times article that concluded that “(a)lmost no Palestinian questions the demand for Israel’s recognition of the right to return; many, however, now say returning is becoming less and less feasible.” See Hassan M. Fattah, “For Many Palestinians, ‘Return Is Not a Goal,’” New York Times, 26 March 2007. 5. For critical voices on his conclusions, see, for example, Salman Abu Sitta, “Inalienable and Sacred,” http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/651/op11/htm, 13–20 August 2003 and Ghada Karmi, “The Right of Return: The Heart of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-debate_97/article_1456.jsp, 27 August 2003. For another critical voice from a different angle, see Max Abrams, “The ‘Right of Return ’ Debate Revisited,” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 5 (August–September 2003), accessed at http://www.meib.org/articles/0308_pal1.htm. 6. Said offered his assessment while polemicizing against Palestinian political leaders who were prepared to compromise on the question of return. See his “Introduction: The Right of Return at Last” in Naseer Aruri, Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (London : Pluto, 2001), 4. Meanwhile, the interview with Olmert in the Jerusalem Post from 29 March 2007 can be found at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=4&cid =1173879210818&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull. 7. See Rawidowicz’s lecture at a symposium on the new State of Israel held in 1949, “Two That are One,” in Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the “Ever-Dying People” (1986; reprint, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998), 155. 8. There were some exceptions, as we shall explore in part II, especially in the midst of and after Israel’s wars in 1956 and 1967. 9. In addition to those discussed here, groups ranging from the Reform-oriented American Council for Judaism to the ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta attacked the Zionist goal of statehood on religious grounds. In its opening “Digest of Principles” from August 1943, the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) declared its opposition to “the efforts to establish a Jewish National State in Palestine or elsewhere,” as well as to “all philosophies that stress the racialism, the nationalism and the homelessness of the Jews.” Later, after the state was created, the ACJ accepted the principle of the partition of Palestine, but strenuously affirmed the loyalty of American Jews to the United States. The first article of a new statement of principles from 19 January 1948 proclaimed...